Saturday, January 31, 2015

The Binding of Isaac

The High Place at Petra

One of the
strangest events recorded in the Bible is when God asked Abraham to sacrifice
his son Isaac. How can we understand
this strange and shocking event? I hope,
if you ever feel that God is leading you to sacrifice your child, that you will
say “No!” and will quickly identify the source of this thought as the devil and
not God! But yet this is what the Bible
says God commanded Abraham to do: to
kill his son. How do we make sense of that? How could the God of the Bible even think
of such a thing, let alone command it; and how could Abraham accept that this
was from God?

Now it’s
true that Abraham didn’t know the command “You
will not murder” as found in the Law of Moses (Exo. 20:13). Moses lived about six hundred years after
Abraham, so there’s no way Abraham could have known the commandments in the Law
of Moses. But Abraham could have
known the Laws of Noah, which were given at least five hundred years
before his time.

One of the
Laws of Noah was that “The one spilling
the blood of man, by man his blood will be spilled; for in the image of God has
he made man” (Gen. 9:6). What does
this mean? It’s a command of God that the
penalty for murder is death. This means,
of course, that you shouldn’t murder.

There’s an
illustration of this sin before the time of Noah in the story of Cain and Abel,
the sons of Adam and Eve (Gen. 4:1-15).
I’m sure you remember the story.
Cain was a farmer, Abel was a herdsman.
But when they brought their offerings to God, Abel’s was accepted and
Cain’s wasn’t. We don’t know how they
knew that one was accepted and the other wasn’t. The Bible just says that “the LORD looked (or paid attention) to Abel and to his offering”
(Gen. 4:4). Maybe he received a blessing
from the Lord or an answer to prayer.
But whatever happened made Cain upset; so upset that he killed his
brother.

Now surely Cain
didn’t think he was going to get back into God’s favor by doing that. It was probably more like the tantrum of a
kid who says ‘if I can’t win, then nobody’s going to play the game,’ and then breaks
the toy so no one can play anymore. It
was an outburst of uncontrolled anger, for which Cain refused to repent. And so God punished Cain for murdering his
brother: “And now you are cursed from the ground that has opened its mouth to
receive the (outpouring of) blood of your brother from your hand. When you work the ground, it will no longer
give its strength to you: a wanderer and
homeless you will be on the earth” (Gen. 4:11-12).

This was a
harsh penalty, but not harsh enough to prevent other murders from taking place. These soon increased so greatly on the earth
that God had to send a Flood to cleanse the earth, so he could start over again
with Noah and his family. And this time,
he was careful to establish the law that murder should be punished with death
(Gen. 9:6).

There’s a
message here for us today. Punishing
murderers, but then allowing them to live, leads to more murders, and then to
more murders, until as we can see in the United States, or in places like
Mexico, you end up with an ongoing crime wave of murders that gets worse and
worse. People here in Taiwan think that
crime here is bad, because every crime is published in the newspaper. But in America, there are far too many every
day to include them in the papers—about 40 murders a day. And other countries are even worse. Some of the worst countries for murder are
places where they have eliminated the death penalty or don’t use it any
more: places like Russia, Mexico and
Central America, Brazil and much of sub-Saharan Africa.

But at least
murder is against the law in these countries.
In ancient times, there was a kind of murder that was perfectly legal,
and even honored and respected: human
sacrifice. This was not a rarity or an
oddity in human history, as was once thought.
Today there is an abundance of evidence that proves that human sacrifice
was once widespread all over the world:
in Europe, in the Americas, in Asia, and in Africa.

Ancient pyramids,
found around the world, were often dedicated with human sacrifices. At the consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan
in Mexico in 1487, the Aztecs claim to have killed more than 80,000 people! At their peak, the Aztecs may have sacrificed
as many as 250,000 people a year!

The Japanese
used to bury young ladies alive at the base of important structures to ‘protect’
the buildings against disaster or attack (known as hitobashira, which means ‘human pillar’). Chinese legend says that thousands of people
were buried in a similar way in the Great Wall of China. Whether this is true or not, abundant
evidence of human sacrifice has already been found from the Shang and Zhou
dynasties. The mummies of people offered as sacrifices to
their gods have been found all the way from the Andes of South America to the
bogs of Germany and Denmark.

The Celts of
Europe built big wicker images filled with captives and then burned them
alive. Human sacrifices were also found
buried at Celtic Stonehenge. And I could
go on and on, talking about different people groups from around the world,
including the ancient Greek and Romans, the ancient Slavic peoples of Eastern
Europe, the Chinese, who made human sacrifices to river gods, and also killed
slaves when their owner died, in Tibet, in India, in the islands of the
Pacific, in North and South America, the list goes on and on.

Human
sacrifice was also practiced in Bible times.
The ancient Ammonites, the descendants of Lot, passed their children
through the fire to their god as a sacrifice.
This has been confirmed by the excavation of an ancient Ammonite temple
near the airport in Amman, Jordan.
Buried jars were found containing young human bones.

The Moabites
offered human sacrifices to their god Chemosh, a savage war god, who is
described by them as “intoxicated” with human blood (on the famous Mesha Stone). The
king of Moab sacrificed his son on the walls of the city to repel an Israelite
attack in 2 Kings 3:27: “Then he [the king of Moab] took his
first-born son who was to reign in his place, and offered him as a burnt
offering on the wall. And there came great wrath against Israel, and they
departed from him and returned to their own land.”

The
Phoenicians, known as Canaanites in the Bible, also practiced human sacrifice. The bones of children that were sacrificed have
been found in a special cemetery in ancient Carthage in Tunisia: more than 20,000 children are buried here.

But it
wasn't only Israel's neighbors that engaged in this horrific practice.
The kings of Judah themselves made their children "pass through the fire" (2 Kings 16:3, 17:17, 21:6,
23:10, 2 Chronicles 33:6). The site of
this ritual in Jerusalem was known as Topheth, a place of worship deep down in
the Gehinnom Valley, just to the south of the city. This was tremendously
upsetting to the prophet Jeremiah (Jer. 7:31,32; 19:6,11-14). This is one of the reasons Gehinnom (Gehenna in Greek) became an image of
eternal punishment in the teaching of Jesus and the rabbis (Matt. 5:22,29,30;
10:28; 18:9; etc. in the original language).

Even in New
Testament times, Israel’s neighbor Edom was involved in human sacrifice. This can be seen at the ancient city of
Petra, one of the most famous tourist sites in the Middle East. The name “Petra” means a steep, rocky cliff,
which surround the city on all sides. Into
many of these are carved beautifully decorated tombs, up to a height of forty
meters and more. The apostle Paul likely
visited Petra during his three years in Arabia, since Petra was the capital
city of the kingdom known as Arabia at the time (Gal. 1:17,18).

Petra was a
well-known religious center. High up
above the cliffs were the city’s high places, where sacrifices and rituals took
place on a regular basis. Impressive
processions once wound their way up steep steps cut in the rock to offer
sacrifices to Dhu-Sharra (the ‘god of Seir’).
These are some of the best preserved of the ancient high places
mentioned in the Bible. In the main high
place of Petra, there is a shallow courtyard cut into the rock facing an altar
platform used for blood sacrifice. There
are drains and a basin next to it for pouring out blood and washing up
afterwards. But what where they
sacrificing here?

The scholars who first studied Petra in modern
times liked to romanticize the place, speaking of its inhabitants as a noble,
peaceful people. Yes, there was an ancient historical notice that at
Petra, human sacrifice was offered every year to Al-Uzza, one of the daughters
of Allah that we talked about once before.
But without other evidence, it was easy to doubt that ancient report. That was until the discovery of an
inscription nearby that mentioned human sacrifice: "Abd-Wadd, priest of Wadd, and his son
Salim, and Zayd-Wadd, have consecrated the young man Salim to be immolated to
Dhu Gabat. Their double
happiness." What is immolated? It means to be killed as a sacrifice. Apparently, it was considered a great honor
to be chosen as a sacrifice.

This is one of the strangest things about some
of the most well-documented examples of human sacrifice: that sometimes the victims went willingly to
their deaths. Salim and his family
considered it a “double happiness.” Amongst the Palestinians today, sacrificing
oneself or one’s children for Allah is considered a great honor. Today it’s no longer done on an altar, of
course, but with a pack of dynamite strapped to your body, or driving a car
bomb or an airplane into a busy city.
Suicide terrorists are looked at as religious heroes by their parents
and neighbors. When they die, their
family has a party celebrating their marriage to the houris (women in the Muslim paradise) in the next life. Posters are put up after their deaths,
celebrating their martyrdom.

Many
Palestinian parents have pictures of their kids taken at a young age dressed as
martyrs for the faith, encouraging them to make that their life’s goal. In the Iran-Iraq war, children were used to
clear mine fields with their own bodies.
They were tied together with ropes in long lines and forced to march
ahead of the tanks. It’s easy for us to
react with horror to these events, and to think of people that could do such
things as being so radically different than ourselves.

Yet modern
Western and Westernized societies, including Taiwan, have sacrificed far more
children than these on the altar of abortion.
This may not be done as part of a specifically religious ritual. Yet this modern form of murder is justified by
what are in fact religious ideas like atheism and evolution. These same ideas have also been used to
promote the killing of those considered inferior, including “inferior races,”
such as Jews, gypsies, and different native populations (like the Tasmanian
aborigines).

Since 1973,
57 million children have been aborted in the United States alone. That’s more than a million children every
year. Since 1980, more than 1 billion
children have been aborted worldwide. That’s
more than 30 million murders a year. In
Taiwan, they say three kids are aborted for every one born. Compared to this, all the murders and ritual
sacrifices of the past were insignificant.
We’re talking about millions and millions of children dying constantly
at the hands of doctors and with the consent of their own parents. This is far worse than anything done in the
past.

Some claim
that the practices of child sacrifice and abortion are radically
different. Yet in both, the parents kill
their own children. In ancient times,
child sacrifice was practiced to avert potential dangers in the future or to gain
success through fulfilling a vow. It was
used to terminate the lives of children born from prostitution and other
illicit sex. It may also have been used
as a form of population control, and as a way of maintaining wealth in a
family, by not having to divide up the family’s wealth into too many pieces. It was also used to “exchange” a defective
child for a healthy child. Well today,
women also abort their children to avoid danger to their future success in
their careers, education, or reputation, or even just to avoid an interruption of
their lifestyle. This is especially the
case in pregnancies that result from illicit sexual activity. And some societies encourage abortion as a
form of population control, like China. Others
use it to limit family size in order not stretch the family’s finances too
thin. Yet others use it as a means to
destroy “defective” children. So where
is the difference?

And this is
only one of the many sins that make our proud modern age an evil and adulterous
generation in the eyes of God. Do you
remember what God did the last time that murder got so wildly out of
control? What did Jesus say? “And
just as it happened in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the
Son of Man” (Luke 17:26). Are we
there yet? Has it gotten that bad
yet? Because when it does, God is going
to bring the whole evil system to a sudden halt.

Wherever it’s
occurred, human sacrifice has been considered the highest form of sacrifice—the
most powerful kind of sacrifice. This is one of the reasons why the
so-called “right” to abortion is so closely guarded by those holding the so-called
“modern,” but actually ancient beliefs of atheism and evolution. Because the essence of human sacrifice, as
with murder itself, is to demonstrate power over human life, power over human
moral choices. This power to decide what
is moral and what is not, including the decision to take away or not to take
away human life, is correctly seen as a god-like power, since it is God himself
who reserves the right to give life and to take it away.

To claim
this power is to claim to be God: a
claim to be the ultimate authority in the universe. In ancient times, these sacrifices were
offered up to various gods. In modern
times, the god-like power to determine morality and even life itself has been
assigned to men and women as the ‘highest intelligences’ in the universe. For this is what evolution offers its
believers: god-like power over the
universe in which there is no power or authority greater than yourself. Man himself or woman herself is the measure
of all things. This, they believe, is
what gives them the right to make their own moral choices, and ignore or reject
what the Bible says.

As a result,
abortion today is one of the most sacred rituals of evolution and its message
of the survival of the fittest: a world
in which might makes right, and the powerful rule over the weak. Just like the child sacrifice of primitive
societies, it serves as a powerful blood ritual that binds its believers together
in a common belief system and a common worldview. To reject abortion means to reject evolution
and secularism and to reject the exalted status of man.

In an
earlier age, the high regard for human sacrifice can be seen in an ascending
list of sacrifices by the prophet Micah in the time of King Ahaz, the same king
that introduced human sacrifice to Judah. What, the prophet asks, will
gain the favor of God (Micah 6:6-7)? The burnt offering of calves?
Or better yet, the sacrifice of thousands of rams? What about offering
thousands of "rivers" of
oil--will that gain God's favor? Or better yet, the sacrifice of a
child: "Should I put my sin on
my first born (as part of a sacrifice), the sin of my soul on the fruit of my body?"
(Micah 6:7). The offering of a first-born child
ends the prophet's list as the most precious possession one could ever
give. Is this what would finally gain God's favor? Some had begun
to think so at the time the prophet was writing. But what does he
answer?

He answers
the question with a resounding 'No'! "He
has told you, man, what is good; and what does the LORD require from you, but
to do justice and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God"
(Micah 6:8). God is not looking for sacrifices. Sacrifices do not impress God nearly so much
as a righteous life: walking humbly,
doing justice. It's difficult not to hear the Prophet Samuel's rebuke
ringing in our ears: "To obey
is better than sacrifice" (1 Samuel 15:22).

But Abraham,
who lived a thousand years earlier, had no access to all this theological
wisdom. Remember, Abraham was the first of the nation of Israel. As
the rabbis teach, he was the first convert to Judaism. He came from a
pagan world, in which even his own family worshipped false gods (Joshua
24:2). They had fallen away from the Laws of Noah. He knew only, like everyone else at the time,
that the greatest sacrifice that could be offered, and the highest sign of
faithfulness to a god, was a first-born child offered up in sacrifice.
And it was on the basis of this widely-held cultural belief that God chose to
test Abraham.

In later
years, it became somewhat embarrassing to think that Abraham and the other
patriarchs didn’t have some of the most basic insights of Mosaic
religion. So it became popular to imagine that they knew and obeyed the
Law of Moses hundreds of years before it was given. But
if Abraham really knew the Law before its time, why would he even consider
offering his own son as a sacrifice, something the Law itself directly forbids
("You shall not murder,"
Exo. 20:13)?

Maybe this
is why so many think of Abraham as a wild-eyed crazy man listening to
irrational voices—the way he’s usually shown in Bible movies. Even
Christians sometimes get the idea from this story that God may ask us to do
wild things that go against our better judgment. Others are inspired to
listen for voices from God, convinced that the more radical and wild the
instructions they receive, the more godly or "spiritual" the
communication. All of these are horrible distortions of the Bible's
message.

The
simple fact of the matter is that Abraham didn’t know all the law that would
come hundreds of years later. He was raised a pagan, in a society that
had abandoned the Laws of Noah. So he
didn’t know that there was anything wrong with God's request that he sacrifice
his son. It was the norm in the culture around him, the highest
expression of commitment you could offer to your god. God was dealing
with Abraham according to Abraham's own level of understanding. But God's
purpose was to bring Abraham to a new level of understanding, through an
experience that would impact not only Abraham, but the entire
world.

Genesis calls Abraham's experience a test (Gen. 22:1: “And it
happened after these things that God tested Abraham, and he said to him,
‘Abraham,’ and he said, ‘Here I am.’”). But if human sacrifice was so
widely accepted and practiced, in what way was this a test? Just because
it was common doesn’t mean it was easy.
The next verse calls Isaac his beloved son (Gen. 22:2: “And he
said, ‘Take now your son, your only one that you have loved, Isaac, and go to
the land of Moriah and make him go up there as a whole-burnt-offering on one of
the mountains that I will speak of to you.’”). Isaac was the son of promise—the one Abraham
had waited so many years for—the son through whom God had promised to give
Abraham many descendants. But Isaac was still unmarried. If he was
killed now, what would happen to that promise?

Abraham had
to decide what was more important: The
son he had so desperately wanted, or obedience to God. Have you ever had an experience like that? That the very thing you feel God is calling
you to do seems to be stopped or blocked by God himself? What are you supposed to do about that? The ministry you felt God was giving you and
calling you to do, suddenly he takes it away.
What do you do? The relationship
you felt God had given you is suddenly taken away. What do you do? The job you felt God was calling you to do is
taken away. What then? Perhaps it’s a test, just as it was with Abraham;
a test to see where your priorities lie.
Are you trusting your calling or trusting God? Are you trusting the person or trusting
God? Are you trusting the job or
trusting God? There’s only one way out
of that kind of bind. You’ve got to
trust God, whether that calling ever develops the way you thought it was going
to or not, or that relationship, or that job.
We’ve got to put God first.

Abraham decided to trust God. The
New Testament says that Abraham believed that God, if necessary, would raise
Isaac from the dead. As it says in Heb.
11:17-19: “By faith Abraham has offered up Isaac, for he was tested; and was
offering up his only begotten—he who received the promises [in other words,
despite having received the promises], 18
to whom it was said, ‘In Isaac your seed will be called’ 19 –reckoning
that God is able to raise up even from the dead; from which [from the dead] he
also received him back as a parable [a foreshadowing of the Messiah that
would be raised from the dead].’”

This interpretation
in Hebrews is probably based on what Abraham said to the young men that were
with them, “We will worship and we will
return to you” (Gen. 22:5). Abraham had no doubt that God was
going to fulfill his promise. So Abraham
took his son, Isaac, to offer him up as a whole burnt offering.

Abraham's
goal, according to later Jewish tradition, was the same hill where the Jewish
Temple would later be built, alongside the city of Salem, later known as
Jerusalem. But the Bible makes no mention of a city. It doesn’t mention the townspeople and fields
Abraham would have met there, in a city where he was known to the king (remember
his meeting with Melchizedek in Gen. 14?).
Instead the Bible mentions only that he went to the "land of Moriah" (Gen. 22:2), which seems to have been an
uninhabited area somewhere in the desert.

When he arrived, Abraham had to build an altar for the sacrifice (Gen. 22:9: "Then they came to the place of which God had told him; and Abraham
built the altar there, and arranged the wood, and bound his son Isaac, and laid
him on the altar on top of the wood”). The altars of the Bible were
large, square piles of stone or earth with enough room for a man or even a cow
on top. The dimensions for altars given in the Bible are 2½ meters (7½
feet) square and almost 1½ meters (4½ feet) high (Exo. 27:1). This means
it took quite some time to build and prepare: there was lots of time for
Abraham to think deeply about what he was about to do.

When everything was prepared, Isaac was bound and laid out on the pile of wood
on the altar (22:9). Then Abraham
stretched out his hand to take the knife to kill his son (22:10). By this
time, Isaac certainly knew what was going on.
But there’s no indication that he resisted, or even said anything more
to his father. He certainly knew of the
tradition of human sacrifice in the desert.
But he just seems to have quietly accepted it. This is an often overlooked part of the
story. Just as Abraham had faith in God,
so did Isaac, even in the face of his own death.

But just as
Abraham was about to kill his son, the Angel of the Lord called to him from
heaven, "Don't stretch out your hand
against the boy and don't do anything to him; because now I know that you are
God-fearing; and you did not withhold your son, your only one, from me"
(22:12). Abraham had passed the test. But the lesson was just
beginning.

For just at that moment, Abraham looked up and saw a ram caught in the brush by
its horns, the provision of God to be offered in place of his son (Gen. 22:13: “Then Abraham raised his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him a ram
caught in the thicket by his horns; and Abraham went and took the ram, and
offered him up for a burnt offering in the place of his son”). The
message was clear: the God of Abraham does not require human sacrifice,
but is willing to accept a substitute instead.

Abraham's
obedience led eventually to the abolition of child sacrifice not only in
Israel, but later in the Christian nations of the world. Today it is illegal even in pagan
nations. In a very real and physical way, all the nations of the earth
have been blessed because of Abraham's obedience. As it says in verse
18: "And all the nations of
the earth will bless one another by your seed because you have listened to my
voice."

There was an important insight, though, in the horrible
ancient practice of human sacrifice:
that man in his natural condition is distant from God, and it requires
drastic measures to maintain a relationship with him. As the prophet Micah said, "With what will I go before the LORD, will
I bow to the God on high? Will I go
before him with whole burnt offerings, with year-old calves? Is the LORD
pleased with thousands of rams, with tens of thousands of rivers of oil? Should I put my sin on my first born, the sin
of my soul on the fruit of my body?”(Micah
6:6-7).What sacrifice could
possibly be great enough? Even human
sacrifice is not enough. In fact, there
is no sacrifice that we could ever possibly give that is great enough to deal
with the problem of sin.

Yet God himself came up with a greater sacrifice, a sacrifice
so much greater than human sacrifice that it can deal with all sin
forever. What could be greater than
human sacrifice? For God to offer
himself as a sacrifice for our sins.

How could he possibly do that, since he is spirit and can
never die? He did it by joining himself
to a creature we can see, to a man, a man who would clearly identify himself as
God, a man that would reveal God’s goodness and love and care for us. He would be a man that would awaken the love
of God in us, a love even greater than the love we have for our children, a
love that stretches to eternity and beyond.
He would show us a love that we would never want to be separated
from. Yet he would also be our true child,
the Son of Man, as well as being the Son of God. And then that God-man, that perfect,
wonderful man, that perfect human God-child, would die at our own hands as a
sacrifice to God: the perfect sacrifice
to atone for our sin.

God did not kill Jesus.
God did not need to offer a sacrifice.
We needed the sacrifice. And
though we did it in sin and disobedience, Jesus is our sacrifice to God: the most precious offering that anyone could
possibly imagine, and a role that he willingly accepted (John 10:18, Heb. 12:2).

Some people are confused about the nature of Jesus’
sacrifice, in part because of what he said on the cross: “My
God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
They think this means that he was abandoned by God on the cross. But nothing could be further from the
truth. The words he spoke are a quote
from Psa. 22:1, a psalm that goes on to talk about the victory of the one
suffering: a picture of Jesus’ own victory,
despite the cross. As it says in Psalm
22:24, “For he [God] did not despise and
did not detest (was not angry at [LXX]) the affliction of the afflicted one,
and he did not hide his face from him; and when he cried (for help) to him, he
heard.” The cross is not about a
separation between God and his son. They
can never be separated. They are
spiritually one forever. It’s about a
separation between us and our “son,” the Son of Man, who reveals God to us. It’s about the separation of death, the agony
he went through for us, and that we feel, being separated from him. It’s about the price he paid for us to be
made right with God, for us to be freed from sin.

In
fact, Abraham’s experience was not just about Abraham. It was pointing to this much greater
sacrifice, the sacrifice of the Son of Man, God’s own Son. Notice the details: Isaac is Abraham’s only
or "unique" son. This is just
what John 3:16 says about Jesus, that he is God's "only" or
"unique" son, offered up "that
every one that believes
in him will not perish, but will have eternal life." The "thicket" (or wood) in which
the ram was caught by its horns is a picture of Jesus, caught on the wood of
the cross. Abraham received back his son
as from the dead (Heb. 11:19), a picture of the resurrection.

Even the ascension
is pictured here. The name of the
offering requested by God is usually translated "whole burnt
offering" (Gen. 22:2,3,etc.), but in Hebrew it’s called an olah (o-LAH),
which means literally "that which goes up" or "that which
ascends." The idea is that the sacrifice ascends in the cloud of
smoke to God. According to Acts 1:9, Jesus also ascended in a cloud to
God. All the elements of the Christian message are here: the
promised seed which is the Messiah, the only-begotten son of the father, the
cross, his death for us, even the ascension into heaven in the
cloud.

But there's
more: The Angel of the Lord spoke again from heaven, saying that God
would reward Abraham for his obedience by blessing his "seed" with many descendants: "I will greatly multiply your seed as the stars of the heavens and
as the sand that is on the shore of the sea" (Gen. 22:17). In
other words, that singular seed, the Messiah, will be multiplied as the stars
of the heavens. What is this talking about? The body of the
Messiah, as described in Daniel 12:3: "And
those who have insight will shine brightly like the brightness of the expanse of heaven, and those who lead the
many to righteousness like the stars forever and ever." Abraham
is not only the father of Israel, but of all those who come to his God by
faith.

As Paul says
in Galatians: "Know then that
those who are of
faith, these are sons of Abraham. But the Scripture, foreseeing that God
would make the nations righteous by faith, announced the good news in advance
to Abraham that, 'All the nations will be blessed in you'" (Gal.
3:7-8). That good news is that you, if you are a believer in Jesus, if
you have accepted his sacrifice for you, you are the fulfillment of the promise
to Abraham, no matter what nation of the world you come from (Gal. 3:29).
You are one of that number, like the stars of heaven, that the Angel of the
Lord was talking about. You are part of the eternal plan and destiny of
mankind that God revealed to Abraham.

And
the rest of vs. 17? "And your
seed will possess the gate of his enemies" (Gen. 22:17). The
Messiah, the promised "seed,"
will control the gate of his enemies. What is this talking about?
In Matthew, Jesus says to Peter, "On
this rock, I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overpower
it" (Matt. 16:18). The gates of Hades, the place of death, are
the gates of Messiah's final enemy. But he will be victorious over
them. Jesus now holds the key to the gates of death, as he has proven by
his resurrection. And his victory will be complete when the dead are
raised at his return. "Then
will come about the saying that is written, 'O death, where is your victory? O
death, where is your sting?'" (1 Cor. 15:55, quoting Hosea
13:14).

What
an incredible revelation is contained in Abraham's experience! Not only
was it a type of things to come. The one present with him and speaking
these promises was himself the one that would fulfill them: the Angel of
the Lord who speaks as God and who is God; the Son of God, who took on flesh to
become Jesus the Messiah, the Son of Man, to die on our behalf, the ultimate
sacrifice for our sins.

He is the
one by whom all these things have and will come to pass. And he is here today by his spirit to
minister his light, his love, and his forgiveness to us, to make us right with
God and change our sinful ways. Amen?

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About New Church

Join us at New Church in Taichung, Taiwan! The messages posted here are the Sunday messages shared with the church by Pastor Jeff Harrison. For more information about the church, click on the Church Info or Facebook Group links under the photo at the top of this page. For more information about Jeff, check out the link to his ministry website (To The Ends).